All-American Murder Read online

“You lied,” the administrator said. “Right now, you’ve got a small window of opportunity to help yourself out. It’s as simple as that, okay? You know you lied, okay? I’m here to help you out. I want to do what I can, okay? I really do. But I’m not into playing games and doing all this stuff. I’m just straight up with you. You know you lied. Tell me the real story and let’s go from there.”

  “Hmmm?” Ortiz said.

  “There is no ‘hmmm.’”

  “I didn’t get out of the car. I opened the door. I didn’t get out of the car.”

  The administrator was not buying any of it.

  “Carlos, you can say that all you want…You are lying.”

  “What you want me to tell you?”

  “I want you to tell me the truth because that’s not the truth, all right? We can help each other out here. You can be honest about this whole thing. Carlos, tell me what really happened that night, ’cause you are not. You are trying to be a little…”

  “Listen, listen, I mean, I didn’t see what happened. I mean, I seen when everybody got out, you know. I never got out. I was about opening the door and that’s when I heard the gunshot.”

  “Okay. What did you see?”

  “Aaron was, like, towards, like, the car, like, towards behind, like. They took a little walk. I didn’t hear no arguing. Nothing. And it just happened like this, like, you know. So that’s what I really seen. But I remember Aaron—as soon I went like this, I see Aaron run in the car, okay, and Bo slam the door.”

  “All right. Here is the problem, okay, because that’s very similar to what you’ve told me before. You failed the exam as far as being out of the car. You failed the exam, okay? You failed the exam all around. You failed it. All right.”

  “Yeah, but I was nervous. I’m nervous right now.”

  “You’re nervous now, because now I know that you know more.”

  “No, I was nervous right there, too.”

  “No, Carlos. Right before all this, we sat here, and we talked, and we said if you had done something, if you were there…”

  “I never—I never—I’ve been doing good—I’ve been telling you, I never—I didn’t get out of the car. I never got out of the car ’cause I remember I never got out of the car. Bo was still right there. He and Aaron took a walk, whatever.”

  “So maybe what the problem is…here is what the problem is…”

  “I never got out of the car.”

  “I’m trying to give you a chance to give some truth to this, okay? If you didn’t get out of the car, the only real possibility of you failing this exam—”

  “Nervous.”

  “Listen to me, nervousness has nothing to do with it, nothing, all right?”

  “I’m scared. I’m scared.”

  “Look at me, Carlos. Here is what happened: You saw Aaron shoot him.”

  Ortiz said, “No.” But he was inching his way toward a more believable story.

  “I’m willing to do—like, help, anything, like,” he said. “I want to cooperate, like, work with you. Like, I’m—like this is—call me a snitch. Call me what the fuck you want. I’m willing to tell you what I know.”

  “Carlos, you have been put into an awful, awful situation.”

  Ortiz had agreed to a DNA swab. During the polygraph test he had also been asked: “Did you shoot O?” “Did you shoot O that day?” and “Did you get out of the car when O was shot?”

  His answers had been categorized as “deception indicated.”

  Then, Ortiz had changed his story: he had opened the door, he explained, but he had not stepped out of the car.

  It was too dark to see Hernandez shoot Lloyd.

  But right after hearing the gunshots, Ortiz said, he had watched Aaron run back to the car, cradling the gun in his hand.

  Chapter 66

  It was so stupid,” says an officer who took part in the investigation. “If Hernandez had shot Lloyd in Dorchester, or even in Plainville. If he’d done it in the club’s parking garage, he would have gotten away with it. Think about it: Hernandez left the shell casings there, by the body, for us to collect. A few days later, we were collecting evidence from a dumpster. The casing that came out of his car was a perfect match. Same firing pin and everything. People would say, ‘How did that shell casing get in the car? He must have shot Lloyd in the car.’ Well, he didn’t shoot Lloyd in the car. Hernandez was so freaking crazy, he pulled out of the clearing and drove down the street shooting at street signs. He was so stoned, so drunk. Just out of his mind.”

  Hernandez was also famous, and rich, with access to excellent lawyers. The case against him needed to be bulletproof.

  By Wednesday morning, the police were convinced that it was.

  Wesley Lowery was checking Twitter in his third-floor walk-up apartment in Allston when he saw the news: Jenny Wilson, a Hartford Courant reporter, had been on an overnight stakeout of Hernandez’s house. She was reporting that the Patriot had just been arrested.

  The police had marched Aaron out of the house in handcuffs. The Patriot’s arms were hidden inside a white V-neck T-shirt that stretched over his hulking torso like a giant straitjacket.

  Lowery, a twenty-three-year-old reporter for the Boston Globe, jumped up, got dressed, and ran to his car—a Pontiac Grand Prix with a power-steering problem.

  As he did, he checked in with his editor.

  The Globe had only just hired Lowery, who’d interned at the paper previously and been a reporting fellow at the Los Angeles Times. For the most part, he’d covered local politics, along with general assignments from the metro desk. But, young as he was, Lowery had proven himself to be smart and tenacious. In 2014, the National Association of Black Journalists would name him “Emerging Journalist of the Year.” Two years later, he would win a Pulitzer Prize.

  Lowery had staked Aaron’s house out already that week, and interviewed Odin Lloyd’s mother.

  He did not want to miss out on Aaron’s arraignment.

  “It’s going to be in North Attleboro,” the editor said. “File from inside the courthouse.”

  Lowery had been inside the Attleboro District Court building before. He knew that it was a dead zone, as far as communications went. Nothing went in or out of the building. But his editor wanted up-to-the-minute reporting: iPhone video, live tweets.

  Less than two hours after Aaron’s arrest, another news bulletin had come in: the Patriots had cut Hernandez.

  “A young man was murdered this week and we extend our sympathies to the family and friends who mourn his loss,” the team said in its statement. “Words cannot express the disappointment we feel knowing that one of our players was arrested as a result of this investigation.”

  Now, as he made his way out to Attleboro, the reporter tried to think of the best way to file.

  “I pulled up and parked, and there was already a massive stakeout in front of the courthouse,” Lowery recalls. “There were people and cameras everywhere. Fox is there. ESPN. Everyone wants the shot, the video, or still image of Hernandez being driven up and led in. Sitting out there for a moment I thought, this is actually a pretty small courthouse. It’s not equipped for the massive amount of camera equipment, for all the reporters, all the technology. There might not be enough outlets in there.”

  The first order of business was avoiding the scrum of reporters who would be caught in the hallway while Aaron was being arraigned inside one of the courtrooms.

  Approaching a clerk, Lowery asked for a best guess: Which courtroom would Hernandez be brought to?

  “Finally,” Lowery says, “Hernandez arrives. You can feel it, even inside the courthouse. You see all the media members rushing around the building to get the shot of him being driven in. Then, there’s a massive rush back inside.”

  The clerk’s best guess turned out to be a good one. By staying inside of the building, Lowery had gotten ahead of the pack. He was in the room when the doors were thrown open and Aaron Hernandez was led inside.

  “It was a comple
te mess,” Lowery says. “It was standing room only. It was the biggest news story of the moment, and I didn’t know if they could get video out of the courtroom.”

  Lowery had a front-row seat for the proceedings.

  Hernandez was still dressed in the red shorts and white T-shirt he had been arrested in. He betrayed no emotion while charges against him were read.

  There were six in all. Five for firearms violations. One for murder.

  “Everyone was like, ‘Wait? What!?’” Lowery remembers. “‘They’re actually trying Hernandez for murder?’ The disbelief was palatable.”

  Then, the prosecutors began to lay out the evidence: The last text from Odin Lloyd, sent at 3:23 a.m. Surveillance footage of the Nissan Altima leaving the clearing four minutes later.

  “They had pictures of Hernandez holding what they believe is the gun moments after the murder,” Lowery recalls. “They walked through a series of text messages between Lloyd and Hernandez.”

  Lowery had set his phone up to send tweets out via text. For a moment—“an eternity at a time like this”—he was the only reporter there who could communicate with the outside world.

  He did so until the arraignment ended, with Hernandez pleading “not guilty” to all of the charges.

  “What just happened?” a sports reporter asked Lowery.

  “They just charged him,” Lowery said. “That’s what happened.”

  According to Lowery, the feeling in the air was, “There was no way that Aaron Hernandez had murdered someone. He might have been there. He might have been in the wrong place hanging out with the wrong guys. He didn’t kill this guy.”

  Lowery was not so sure. He had seen other defendants arraigned. He had seen the full range of emotions, running all the way from defiance to despair. He had never seen a reaction like Aaron’s.

  Hernandez “was relatively stone-faced,” Lowery recalls. “He looked in so many ways normal. It was almost as if he was supposed to be there.”

  Chapter 67

  That evening, a white-and-gold van belonging to the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office passed a press gaggle stationed outside of the Bristol County House of Correction in Dartmouth, paused at an outer gate, and went inside the facility. (Bristol County, Massachusetts, is about 120 miles east of Bristol, Connecticut, where Aaron Hernandez grew up.) A black Ford Explorer and a K-9 unit pulled in behind the van.

  There was a second gate on the far side of the first. For security purposes, it only opened when the first gate closed. (Prison officials called this space “the trap.”) When the van had passed through both gates, corrections officers opened the back doors, helped Aaron Hernandez step down, and led him into the jail.

  In the processing room, Aaron’s wrist and ankle restraints were removed. He was told to stand with his back to the wall. Then he was ordered to sit in a metal-detecting “boss check” chair.

  If Hernandez had anything stuffed up his rectum, the chair would sound an alert.

  Then, Hernandez was led to a body scanner. He was told to stand sideways on a short conveyer belt, keeping his arms and his head up.

  The belt moved him through in three seconds.

  Up to this point, everything Hernandez experienced was standard operating procedure at the jail. What came next—an interview with the warden himself—was a departure.

  “I told my staff to notify me when he’s on his way,” says Sheriff Thomas Hodgson. “When he came in, I pulled him aside and introduced myself: ‘I’m the sheriff here. There’s a couple of things I want you to know. First of all, you’re not going to be treated any better or any worse than anybody else. Number two, we have rules here. You are to follow the rules. If somebody’s in the area where you are that does not belong in the area, you need to notify the staff or the supervisor on duty.’”

  Given Hernandez’s stature, the sheriff says, “we wanted to make sure our staff wasn’t tempted to hang out with him, because of his notoriety and his wealth, and that he was not using his popularity to try to manipulate the staff.”

  The sheriff let Hernandez know that he was going to be held by “special management” in the jail’s medical unit for a week or two.

  “He was coming from a seven-thousand-square-foot home to a seventy-square-foot cell, and that in itself was a huge transition, never mind his popularity. He was going from a place where people revered him to a place where he was just another number—and that, in a nutshell, speaks to the drastic difference that he was going to be stepping into.”

  Following his conference with Hodgson, Hernandez was asked a series of standard questions. He was sent down the hall for a mental health interview, which showed nothing abnormal. Then, he was put into a one-man holding cell. This was standard operating procedure for famous prisoners, as well as for sex offenders—seclusion from the prison’s general population.

  After a while, Aaron heard his name called. The cell door opened and he was brought to a property room, where he was ordered to strip. Aaron’s red shorts, underwear, shoes, socks, and XXL white T-shirt were put in a mesh garment bag (prison officials called it “the strap”) and his prison outfit was issued: two pairs of socks and underwear, a T-shirt, a jumpsuit, and a set of shoes, along with a “care kit” that contained one sample-size deodorant, a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, and a bottle of three-in-one wash.

  Finally, Aaron was led down Medical Hallway to Cell #1 in Sector C: Health Services. A metal bed welded to the floor in the center of the room took up all but a two- or three-foot ring of floor space. The bedframe had holds for restraints. A thin blue mattress sat on top of it. In the upper left corner, a camera surveyed everything in the room. A safety light hummed from the ceiling, fluorescent, encased in stainless steel, impossible to tear down. In the corner by the door there was a sink–toilet unit that had not been flushed since the cell’s previous resident had used it.

  Chapter 68

  At two in the afternoon on Thursday, June 27—the day after his arraignment—Aaron Hernandez was driven to the Bristol County Courthouse, in Fall River, for his bail hearing.

  Bristol County Assistant DA Bill McCauley described the argument Hernandez had had with Odin Lloyd. He admitted that the police had not recovered a murder weapon, which they believed to be a .45 Glock. Hernandez seemed to be holding a Glock in surveillance footage taken from his house, the police had recovered a clip of .45 ammunition from a Humvee that Hernandez owned, they had found .45 bullets in Hernandez’s apartment in Franklin, and, McCauley said, a photograph had emerged of Hernandez holding a Glock .45.

  James Sultan, who was one of Aaron’s lawyers, pointed out that Aaron had no criminal record. But Hernandez did have a home, a fiancée (who was there at the hearing), and an infant daughter. Aaron’s celebrity status would make it hard for him to flee justice, Sultan argued. Moreover, the Commonwealth’s case against his client was weak: There were no eyewitnesses to the murder. The evidence was entirely circumstantial.

  “Mr. Hernandez is not just a football player but he is one of the best football players in the United States of America,” Sultan said. “He’s a young man who is extremely accomplished in his chosen profession.”

  Aaron would post a large cash bail, and agree to house arrest and a GPS tracking bracelet. “He wants to clear his name,” Sultan assured the court.

  Judge Renee Dupuis was skeptical. She pointed out that it was rare for bail to be granted in first-degree-murder cases and called the circumstantial evidence against Hernandez “very, very strong.”

  “This gentleman, either by himself or with two other individuals that he requested come to the Commonwealth, basically, in a cold-blooded fashion, killed a person because that person disrespected him,” Dupuis said. “If that’s true, and based upon presentation it seems to be, I’m not confident that type of individual would—he obviously doesn’t adhere to societal rules. The idea that I can release him on a bracelet and he would comply with court rules is not something that I am willing to accept.”

  Sh
ayanna burst into tears when bail was denied.

  Once again, Aaron betrayed no emotion.

  Chapter 69

  That evening, Massachusetts police issued a wanted poster for Ernest Wallace.

  Aaron’s friend was “wanted for accessory after the fact for the murder of Odin Lloyd in North Attleboro,” the poster read. “Wallace is considered armed and dangerous and was last seen operating a silver/gray Chrysler 300 R.I. Registration Number 451-375.”

  It had been several days since Wallace had seen the Chrysler, which had been abandoned outside of a housing complex in Bristol. And it had been several days since anyone in Massachusetts had seen Wallace, who was holed up at his mother Angella’s house in Miramar, Florida.

  To get to there, Wallace had hitched a ride with TL Singleton’s aunt, Euna Ritchon.

  Ritchon lived with her mother in Bristol but had seven grandchildren of her own down in Georgia. She had already been planning to see them when TL’s wife—Aaron’s cousin, Tanya Singleton—convinced her to move the visit up by a week, taking herself and Wallace along.

  The three of them had driven through the night, using back roads. In North Carolina, Ritchon’s car broke down. Euna’s daughter drove eight hours to get them and bring them to Georgia, where Ritchon watched Tanya give Wallace a new cell phone and use her credit card to buy him a bus ticket to Florida.

  In Florida, neighbors had seen Wallace swimming in his mother’s pool.

  And on Friday, Wallace walked the half mile from Angella’s house to the local police station and told the cops that he wanted to talk, even though his attorney had advised him not to.

  Two days later, on Sunday, June 30, Tanya’s husband, TL, drove his Nissan Maxima off of a road in Farmington, Connecticut. After flying through the air for one hundred feet, the car crashed into the side of the Farmington Country Club, where it lodged, six feet up in the air. Miraculously, Tabitha Perry—Singleton’s twenty-seven-year-old ex-girlfriend, and the mother of one of his children, who was riding in the passenger seat—survived the crash, only to die of an accidental overdose later that year.